Web users are increasingly conducting their personal and professional lives online by using a variety of different applications and devices to provide functionality for communications, scheduling activities, searching and retrieving information, creating and sharing information and content, and many other applications. A variety of applications and information formats like wikis, blogs, video and audio editors, and personal social networking pages provide increasing capability of users to create and share information. Users may create any number of documents that may be shared by reference to a network location or may be sent as an encapsulated document to another user via email. For example, users might move from creating daily blog posts or mySpace profiles to creating sales presentations, business reports, multimedia entertainment works, non-fiction works, or “electronic books” containing multiple media items of varying formats.
Unfortunately, there fails to be any consistent set of services supporting an arbitrary set of applications that may be used on the web and that may store content on the web accessible by any of the applications. An online user may be able to receive news headlines from RSS feeds but may not be able to store the headline news stories on the web and later access the text messages using a text-to-speech application to listen to the news headlines from a mobile device. Or an online user may be able to send and receive email attachments using client-server based email systems connected over the web, but may not be able to access the content of the attachments using a text editor executing on a handheld device. Similarly, an online user may receive a video conferencing broadcast over the web, but may not be able to store the video conference on the web and later access the video conference from storage on the web using a streaming media application on an IP video phone.
Although there may be a variety of applications commercially available for creating and storing a web page on a client computer or creating and storing a web page on a web page server, there fails to be a data and storage model for a client to create a content file on a client device and to store the content file on the web where it may be accessible by a variety of web-based applications executing on different devices. HTML-style web pages, for instance, fail to support inclusion of such varied forms of context that may be accessible by a variety of web-based applications. What is needed is a system and method that may implement a data and storage model that may accommodate an otherwise varied set of document types, applications, and device configurations so that an online user may seamlessly store and retrieve content ubiquitously using any device connected to the web.